Kristin Harmel has built a career on historical fiction set against the backdrop of World War II, so “Meet Me in Paris” registers as something of a departure — a present-day, multi-strand love story that trades occupied France for the City of Light as it exists today, sunlit cafés and all.
The novel centers on Julia Glover, who brings her twenty-three-year-old daughter Piper to Paris for what both of them know, though neither says aloud at first, will be their last trip together; Julia is dying. Around that central relationship, Harmel weaves in additional storylines, including an elderly man named Henry revisiting a wartime romance with a woman named Celeste, now complicated by her encroaching dementia. The structure lets Harmel move between generations and kinds of love — romantic, filial, remembered — over the course of a single eventful week in the city.
Harmel’s real gift, on display again here, is warmth without saccharine excess. Her prose favors plainspoken sentences over ornate ones, which keeps the emotional material from tipping into melodrama even when the subject matter — terminal illness, a fading memory, the ache of unfinished love — invites it. The Paris setting is rendered with the kind of granular affection that comes from an author who clearly knows the city well beyond its postcard version; readers get specific neighborhoods, specific cafés, specific light. The Julia-and-Piper thread is the emotional spine of the book, and it’s the strongest of the interwoven stories, largely because Harmel resists easy resolution and lets the mother-daughter relationship stay complicated even as the clock runs out.
Reception to “Meet Me in Paris” has been warm, particularly among readers who have followed Harmel through her run of World War II novels and were curious to see how she’d handle a contemporary, multi-threaded structure. Reviewers have generally praised the book as an effective ensemble piece, singling out the Julia and Piper storyline as the most affecting and the Henry and Celeste thread as a quieter, sadder counterweight. Some pushback has centered on pacing — with several interlocking stories competing for space, a few readers have felt certain threads get shortchanged — and there’s a recurring note that the book occasionally leans on sentiment a beat too hard. But the prevailing view is that the emotion is earned more often than not, and that Harmel’s evident affection for Paris carries the book through its softer patches.
“Meet Me in Paris” won’t replace Harmel’s wartime novels in the hearts of her longtime readers, but it proves she can do more than one kind of story well. It’s a transportive, big-hearted summer read that trusts feeling over cleverness, and for readers looking for a good cry with a view of the Seine, it delivers exactly that.
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